James Joyner comments on the story that Valarie Plame was working on Iranian nuclear issues when she was outed by......

But as for the WMD issue, I wan't implying she was some sort of early-model Jaqueline Bauer, single-handedly foiling terrorist plots; rather that the Administration's revenge-leaking and ham-fisted propagandizing could have had a chilling effect on other CIA folks' work tracking WMDs... Novak didn't _have_ to drop a dime on anyone working on NK nukes (or AQ Khan, etc) for that.

That's a valid point, which brings us back to the all-too-familiar question, "Is the Bush administration against American interests, or are they just incompetent". I for one am sick of the incompetence defence.

The fact that they didin't bother to find out is evidence of their non-seriousness about WMD and terrorism issues.

But for the hell of it, let's go with this...

Given the intel water was so muddy on Iraq.. (and I think we'll see her and her camera-hound husband, were responsible for a good deal of that mud...) ...one wonders if the reason she got outted was so that the waters weren't quite so muddy for Iran. If so, the obvious conclusion is that the Administrations ability to track Iran's Nuke program wasn't damaged by her outting, but rather, damaged by it being her task to track it....her very involvement with it.

Of course, that's not how the KOSsacks will take this one.

Unclear how she was "dragged through the mud" other than the assertion that she helped get her hubby the Niger assignment.

We still have no clear idea of what she was actually doing at the CIA, so there�s no way we can tell what sort of impact her outing might have had.

But we know that Iran has been building nukes, unabated, for years. We've got a pretty good idea how close they are. So, unless she was personally in charge of leading a SEAL team in to take out the locations, there's no reason to think that anything at the CIA had any impact on the Iran program. After all, Novak didn't publish the name of anyone working the North Korea desk and the CIA did nothing to stop their program.

The fact that the exact nature her job remains secret does not mean we can simply posit that the world as we know it would be radically different had Bob Novak not published her name.

It still appears that those who â??outedâ?? his wife did so without the understanding that her employment at CIA was a secret.

That's completely irrelevant to the amount of damage that may (or may not) have been done by her outing. I hadn't heard that she was actively working undercover when she was outed... if that's true, then this just took a whole new, ugly turn. Perhaps some intel pro on the site can comment, but I can't think of any reason why a simple 'desk analyst' would simultaneously have NOC status - it makes no damn sense.

But even if she wasn't actively undercover, she still got dragged through the mud in front of the national media for purely partisan revenge against her husband. If that happened in your office, to one of your co-workers, do you really think it would have no effect on the office's ability to work? To provide unvarnished truth to decision makers?

Further, no one Iâ??m aware of has argued that our ability to track Iranâ??s progress in gaining nuclear weapons is at issue, period. The problem is our decided lack of good options in responding to what we do know.

This statement makes no sense... nobody argued about the impact on our Iran tracking because before now, nobody outside the CIA knew she was working on Iran. We still have no clear idea of what she was actually doing at the CIA, so there's no way we can tell what sort of impact her outing might have had.

If Rove and company actually knew she was "covert" and released her name simply to embarrass her husband, they should go to jail. Regardless, it would have had zero impact on intelligence gathering, merely on Plame's theoretical career track.